Much of today's communications, entertainment, and information search and retrieval activities involve the Internet, a global network of computers, communications links, and protocols. Web browser applications were originally designed as user-friendly portals to the Internet's resources and functionality that facilitated Internet navigation and information search, but have since evolved into more sophisticated and complex software applications. Web browser applications now incorporate sophisticated security and multimedia rendering functions (video, audio, imaging, etc.) and enable a user to navigate and interact dynamically with connected web sites and other Internet users.
Web browsers can be invoked by applications (e.g., word processors, email applications, instant messaging, etc.) or by an operating system to render content or to provide functionality. The invocation of browsers may occur via the activation of anchor links (hyperlinks) that are often embedded in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) documents (web pages) and other displayed material. Hyperlinks may display as highlighted or underlined text to a user but can contain embedded uniform resource locators or URLs, which are the addresses of Internet resources on the World Wide Web, e.g., a web page that is on a web site. When a user activates a hyperlink, often by clicking on the hyperlink with a mouse, a web browser is invoked and passed a URL that is embedded in the hyperlink as a parameter during the invocation. A prefix to the URL is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) which specifies how the URL is interpreted. A common URI contains a character string “http” which identifies the URL as a resource to be retrieved over the Hypertex Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Other common prefixes are “https” (for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), “ftp” (for File Transfer Protocol), and “file” (for files that are stored locally on a user's computer). If a URL points to a web site, which is often a case, the web browser uses the URL to access the web site and render content at the web site in accordance with the configuration that a user has assigned to the web browser.
A web browser's configuration describes the optional behaviors available to the web browser and is often stored in a web browser configuration table that is accessed by the web browser during each invocation of the web browser. For example, often a web browser may be configured to display or to not display images, to enable or to disable JavaScript® scripting language execution, to use a specific search engine, to block accesses to specific web sites, to remember web site passwords, to use a specific application to play video or to play audio, or to use a specific Internet connection, among other options. A web browser's configuration remains constant until changed by a user.